Learn how to play the sponsorship game

I got on Skype with James Nocentini, who is an Evangelist for Couchbase. Couchbase is a NoSQL database company with presence in the Bay Area and in the EU/UK. Unlike many of our evangelists he is based in London. Please tweet him to congratulate him on his first successful podcast interview :).

Props to James for introducing me to The Internet History podcast - http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/

I got on Skype with Eddie Zaneski of SendGrid to talk evangelist and the collegiate hackathon scene. Like a few of our other guests, he lives in Brooklyn. You'll enjoy this interview - SendGrid is one of the pioneers in modern dev evangelism and Eddie is awesome.

Fun fact - Eddie's social media profiles are among the first my team (inside the walls of a tech accelerator near UCLA) discovered when we first started exploring the hackathon scene back in summer 2013.

I got on Skype with Julian who is an evangelist (and senior developer) at Gem, a blockchain startup in Venice Beach California. I feel proud to be featuring a startup from my hometown of West LA on the program.

I got on Skype with Christian Jensen from Sinch. I think you'll enjoy this episode if you a spinout from a bigger company or you're launching a product with the support/resources of a larger organization.

Christian is originally from Sweden and worked at Rebtel, which spun out Sinch as a communication platform with an SDK. You may not be familiar with Rebtel, but their technology has existed for years in Stockholm as a powerful way for expats to call home to their country of origin. Sinch is bi-national and has an office in San Francisco.

Christian's approach to dev evangelism is a bit different than normal given his background and goals for Sinch. In case you are wondering how Sinch stacks up to Twilio, another popular communications platform, we had a good discussion of where their technology differs from Twilio.

This episode is special because we get to hear exactly why one of the largest and most well known hackathons got its start in the first place. I got on Skype with Alexey Komissarouk, founding organizer of PennApps, which was first thrown back in September 2010.

Our conversation focuses on the the genesis of the event and what it was like to be a hackathon organizer before it was cool. We cover how he raised his first sponsorship dollars. We talk about how a desire by Penn CS students to apply skills learned in the classroom prompted the event. Finally, we speculate about why collegiate hackathons took off on the East coast prior to becoming popular on the West coast.

I hope you enjoy it. Please leave a comment here on Posthaven, or tweet me @jnconkle with thoughts and feedback.

This is a special edition of the show which will be useful for anyone who has an interest in sponsoring hackathons.

Producer Daniel turns the tables and interviews me about my experience at HackCon, an exclusive event for hackathon organizers. The result is an executive summary which focuses on the bits that matter for sponsors. In the next 36 minutes, you can expect insights and takeaways from the most interesting talks & breakout sessions.

I flew 3000 miles from California to Brooklyn and spent 2 days learning and networking to bring you this information.

Thanks for listening, and if you have an interest in hackathons as a developer evangelism or recruiting channel, please email me at john@stacked.events or tweet me twitter.com/jnconkle to say hi :).

Listen here on Soundcloud -->

About HackCon:

HackCon is put on by Major League Hacking. If you don't already know MLH, they are like the NCAA of college hackathons, they sanction hundreds of events in the USA, plus a few in Canada, Mexico, the UK, the EU, and Asia. Attending HackCon were 230 organizers, 8 sponsors including Twilio and Thiel Capital, as well as the entire MLH team.

Today is a special episode, a mini-dive into the idea of the future and what education will look like in years to come.

Regular listeners know that I ask each of my guests where they think the future of education is headed. It's an important and fascinating question which will affect us all. I want to dive more deeply into that question, because I feel that hackathons have a place.

I happened to meet the perfect guest while he was visiting Los Angeles and I invited him on the program. Blake Masters is the co-author of a #1 NYT Best-seller Zero to One, which he wrote with Peter Thiel. Blake got his start as an author by posting notes from Peter Thiel's class at Stanford called "Startup", CS 183. You may know Thiel as founder of Paypal and early investor in Facebook, Lyft, Stripe, Spotify, and Space-X.

After getting to know Peter better, Blake now works with him in various ventures. Thiel and Masters run the Thiel Fellowship, a program that awards grants to 20 students under 20 years old to leave school and build an ambitious project of their choice instead. And because of that, I'm very curious what he has to say about the future of education.

I got on Skype with Craig Cannon, who is a co-founder of Cultivated Wit, the people who bring you Comedy Hack Day (CHD). His background is fascinating, including a stint at the Onion. He now lives in the Bay Area.

I first heard about CHD in a discussion with MLH co-founder Jon Gottfried, who said it was a highlight. That made me take notice, and I decided to attend in late 2014. I describe that experience in a previous episode (http://hackathon.posthaven.com/comedy-hack-day-native-advertising-sponsorship) Part of what makes CHD so special is that it's seamless - every aspect of the show was carefully produced, from entering the parking lot to the final demos.

I got on Skype with Cassidy Williams on another guest's recommendation. I was blown away by her enthusiasm for Venmo and personal journey. She made the leap from being unaware that students should do internships at tech companies to hopping around to a hackathon every weekend. She's landed in NYC as Venmo's evangelist and worked at events like PayPal's (parent of Braintree/Venmo) Battlehack.

I felt during this interview that the game has slowed down and I have levelled up as an interviewer. Let me know what you think - I'm @jnconkle on twitter.

I chatted on Skype with Matt Dierker, who is on the organizing team of Hack Illinois. It's a prominent college hackathon which for the time being is unaffiliated with Major League Hacking. Illinois Urbana-Champaigne has notable alumni, including Marc Andreesen, and a large engineering program. Matt organized a complex structure for the Hack Illinois organizing team, and has previously interned at Facebook, Google, and Dropbox.